Restoring a War-Torn Portrait with an Incredible Story..

Some paintings arrive at the studio with no information, no background, no history, no story. But that's not the case with this one. This painting I know pretty much exactly what's happened to it and how it became in the condition that I've now received it. Earlier in the year I received this email from a YouTube viewer. Hello James, I wonder whether you might be able to make anything of the remains of this portrait As I'm sure you will see there's a very sad story behind the vandalized state of this once full-length portrait. I've known this story all my life but didn't know it existed until now. We recently cleared out my old family home and to my amazement I have found this picture in the drawer there. Do you think the face could be saved as a small portrait? There's no frame, it's just a loose scrap of canvas. I'm hoping there's some chance for poor Amalé to be saved in some form or other. So as you can see all we do have is this scrap of canvas in quite poor condition and it's obviously had some kind of traumatic history and hopefully we're going to be able to save what we have left and present it, clean it, restore it, repair that damage and get it back to a position where Bridget can enjoy this portrait and hang it on her wall. The first thing I need to do with this painting is my tests. So as it's just loose at the moment I'm going to prepare just some corners to hold it on this mount board while I put it under UV light, do my test cleans and just see how much work will be required with this painting. I often get paintings in the studio that do have huge sentimental value but the amount of sentimental value attached to this picture is so great. I'm really honoured to be able to work on it and share it with you in this video. So as you can see her face looks quite dirty we've got multiple losses on there as well. So just using the UV light I'm going to see if there's any overpaints which will reflect darker and straight away I can see that her face is very patchy. There's all sorts of muddy discoloured texture across the bridge of her nose, most of her cheeks. I'm imagining this is some form of overpaint. You can see dirt deposits. We can see that crease running across. We've got that loss on her chin. We've got overpaint on her chin as well. So I think this painting's been cleaned in the past. Elements of her hair look a little bit added after the fact too. So I do think this painting has got a discoloured varnish on there and I'm pretty certain that there's overpaint on there from its past too. So we'll have to address that. The first thing I'm going to test for is a dirt layer just to see how dirty this painting is. Now I know that it's been in that envelope for at least 80 years so imagine that any dirt that is on there has been from before that point. So I'm going to use an aqueous solution. I'm just going to do a small test on the surface and just see how much residual dirt is actually on there. Now I was expecting quite a lot to remove but you can see from the swab, although there is some, it's very very light. So I'm thinking that a lot of this dirt and discolouration is actually trapped in the varnish layer. It could have multiple varnish layers on there or it could just have one. But this solvent solution next, and as you can see there straight away, is biting through that varnish and revealing the paint surface below. So I think the majority of this painting is covered in a discoloured varnish and it's probably very quickly applied onto those historical retouchings as well. Okay so we've got the initial tests done. We know it's going to clean now. The next stage is to stabilise that portrait fragment. Now on the back of the painting you can see that we've got the name Amelie on there and it's in a really awkward place. It's right up to the edge of the painting. I don't want to reline the whole painting because I feel like it's unnecessary to do that and we will hide the whole inscription. So my plan is to do a strip lining and on that bottom edge, yes some of it is going to be covered, but I want to minimise that as much as possible. I'm going to record the back of the painting with the photograph as well just to preserve that name. But the strip lining hopefully won't cover all of that. If I can just get enough purchase on there, say 10mm or 12mm with the polyester sailcloth, then hopefully that will be enough to secure the painting. If it's not, we'll have to go with another procedure but that's my plan for now and I think that's what we're going to go with next. So the painting has been cut and it's very close-quartered as well. It's a really unusual size. There's no stock stretchers out there at the right size. It's a little bit small for my usual bespoke stretcher maker. So I've commissioned a very high quality stretcher off another restorer that I know in England and he has made this fantastic stretcher for me. It's bevelled, it's got angled corners, it's got a concave down the front edge so the paint surface won't rest on there. It's the highest quality and it went together with so much ease. It was a real pleasure. This is my polyester sailcloth and if you watched my last video I've started to introduce this into my practice now after a recent trip to Belfast where I did a course on tear mending. This sail cloth is inert, it doesn't stretch, it doesn't move, it doesn't fluctuate and on the last portrait of Edmund Paley it worked really well as a strip lining material. So I'm going to use this today just to strip line Amelie and get her back onto that stretcher. So Amelie was born in 1847 in Posen which was at that time part of the Prussian Empire. Her family belonged to a large community of Jewish people who had lived in that part of Prussia for hundreds of years. She married a wealthy businessman called Isidore Licht and the couple had six children including Sem who was Bridget's great-grandfather. So Sem served in World War I as a medic and amongst other things he had the job of looking after the British prisoners of war at an internment camp outside Berlin. He got on really well with the prisoners and liked them. One of them, a prisoner called Frank Wade, was an artist and he made a lovely pen and ink drawing of Sem treating the British prisoners during their internment and he gifted it to them in 1918 and Bridget still has that hanging in her living room now but that becomes important later in the story. So I've got my polyester sailcloth strips cut. I've used the shearing, pinking shears to kind of give a broken edge and then the next thing I'm going to do is use an adhesive to attach these to the edge of the canvas. Now I just want it to come over about 10 mil so I don't want to apply a really thick coating and bring that strips in too far. These new materials are really good and really strong so I'm just going to catch them on the painting and once I've applied it to both the original painting and the polyester strip I'll allow them to kind of meet up and bond and just apply a little bit of pressure. I just want a really good contact and then I can just force these down just with my fingers and then any excess glue that appears I'll just take that away. You can see here I'm just pushing that right up to the edge and I'll just remove any excess with an old brush. Here's the inscription. Unfortunately this is also going to be covered with the stretcher as well but I did want it to remain as intact as possible and still visible so if someone in the future removes it from the stretcher they're still going to be able to see that inscription. The glue is not going to affect the paint or ink or however that was applied to the back of the canvas either and then I'm going to apply some weights to this allow the glue to dry and when I come back it should have a really nice strong bond to it as well. Probably leave this overnight and then when I come back in I'll be able to carry on with the next stage of the restoration. Sam and Clara saw both their children grow up, marry and start their own families. Their daughter Alice, Bridget's grandma, married Lutz, a young lawyer. Their son Ernst also studied law and married one of Alice's classmates. Through all these years the full-length portraits of Amalie painted in Posen while she was still alive hung on the wall in Sam and Clara's apartment. In 1933 the National Socialists won an election and took over the running of Germany. The first thing they did was pass a law that banned Jews from being lawyers or doctors. There were exceptions to this but it was difficult to get one. Ernst or Lutz didn't get permission to continue law but Sam was permitted to go on as a doctor because of his war record. He was only allowed to treat Jewish patients though. In 1933 the family split. Bridget's grandpa decided that England was the place where he and his family could have a more hopeful future. He got a job as a sales rep for a lighting company and rented a house for himself and his family in Hendon. But in 1938 there was a terrible night of violence against Jews. This was the night of the broken glass or Kristallnacht. All the synagogues were burned down, Jewish businesses were destroyed and a lot of Jews were arrested and there was violence on the streets. The next morning the Gestapo came looking for Sam's other son Ernst who was luckily out at the time and at a family meeting with Sam and Clara it was decided that Ernst's son Klaus would be sent to England to stay with his aunt and uncle and cousin, Bridget's grandpa, until things blew over which of course they never did. He arrived on the last day of 1938 on a Kindestransport with a numbered labelled around his neck which Bridget's family still has today. From then on Klaus became part of the family. So with the strip line fully bonded now I can start to re-stretch Amelie and get her back from being a scrap of canvas to a painting again. It's so nice to actually get her on the stretcher, start applying these tacks and it almost feels like she's becoming whole again after being hidden away for so long in that envelope. To actually get her on the stretcher it kind of gives her a kind of 3D feel again. She feels present in the room rather than just flat. For the tacking edges now I am going to use the same adhesive to fasten it to the stretcher. So the stretcher's got a beveled edge to it which is a traditional way of creating a new stretcher for relining. A lot of glue liners use this kind of stretcher. So I'm just going to use the same adhesive, double side it on each edge and then bond down. And I'm just going to miter the corners to tidy those up as well. There's lots of different ways you can do this and attach them at the back. This is just the method that I prefer at the moment and I do feel like it gives a nice tidy finish to the back of the canvas. Once those tacking edges have dried, maybe a couple of hours, I'm going to start the clean of Amelie now. So I did my tests earlier as you've seen and it's going to be a solvent clean with this painting. There's a discoloured varnish on there but there is also historical overpaint. So this painting was probably done around 1870 maybe. I think it's been cleaned in the past before it got to this present state. There are historical retouchings around her chin, on her cheek. There's elements across the bridge of her nose as well which do look like they may well have been added afterwards. But you can see straight away that once this solvent starts to dissolve that varnish layer, the difference is just staggering. She's going to become so much cleaner. We're going to get to see that lace around her collar. I'm hoping some elements of the colour of her dress come through but I just want to lift her face. She's got a little bit of a melancholy look to her at the moment and I'm hoping that as the clean progresses that might lift a little bit and we might get to see a little bit more of those true colours of the artist and a little bit more of Amelie's character. So I've actually reduced the strength of the solution that I'm using from the one where I did my tests. When you use a cleaning solution and the results are so quick, it tells you that the varnish is a very thin layer and it also tells you that it's very easy to remove. So that can give you a little bit of warning signals as well. You don't want to have a strong solution where it's not necessary. So I've diluted it down but I'm aware as I'm cleaning, especially on her cheek at the moment, it is picking up little areas of pigment. Now these pigment areas are what I believe to be some form of historical overpainting. So I think in its past it has been cleaned and then there's been historical restorations added. Now I don't know how far it's been over cleaned. I don't want to delve too deeply into the layers of this painting. What I'm looking for is a uniform finish across the whole of her face and you'll notice at the moment I'm just being a little bit cautious along that crease. So that crease that runs across the whole of this painting is where it's been folded and the very very fine little cracks. The paint isn't loose. There's no more paint flaking off there. I think the losses are from the initial folding. So I'm just going to carefully clean around it for the moment and then I'll come to that area afterwards. But already we're starting to see that lovely smooth modeling of her face and her eye is just fabulous and I'm getting to see more tones come through now. The other area I'm going to be very cautious is the hair across her forehead. I do also feel like that's been added at some later stage and I don't want to disturb it as well. So I'll be very cautious when I hit that point of the painting too. Where you have losses, like on her right cheek here, you can see that damage all the way down. You have to be kind of careful with your swab because all the little fibers on your on your cotton swab can catch and lift. So when you're working along an area that's got kind of a broken edge it's always a good idea just to be extra careful and you might just roll your swab rather than the circular motion that you normally do when you're cleaning. But there's certain parts of this painting where the swab is just pulling off the same discolored dirty varnish and it's a mid-brown you can see there on the swab and there are definitely areas where there's pigment lifting which is the overpaint from past restorations. So I'm getting kind of mixed results across different parts of the painting. But looking on the bridge of her nose now there are some elements of dirt that I can't lift and I'm thinking that's what was originally retouched to hide. For whatever reason they want me to move and somebody retouched over there. She's also got a little bit under her right eye as well that's got the same kind of discoloration. But yeah the lacework's coming cleaner now. There's a little bit of a red tone in her dress or coat or whatever she's wearing on her shoulders which was nice to see. And then the background as the background's cleaning it's kind of a deep warm emerald kind of color so it's nice to see a little bit of warmth come through there as well. I can only imagine what this painting looked like fully if it was a full standing portrait or if it was head and shoulders or a mid-portrait. But yeah here's those areas where it's holding dirt or old damage. We've got a couple of little losses here but these are quite stubborn so what I'll probably do after the first pass clean is get her onto the bench and then try and tackle those little areas directly like this. So it's a smaller swab it's more direct cleaning and just see what we'll actually remove from those sections as well. But already you can see that she looks much improved she's a lot brighter we've got original tones coming through all that discolored varnish is removed and yeah she's looking good and it's got a real nice model into it as well so whoever painted her I don't know I just love that little highlight on her nose and I know we've got those creases coming through but so far that's the favorite part of the painting for me. Before I do any further work on the painting I'm going to apply a barrier varnish. So this is a hydrocarbon varnish it's fully reversible and it'll protect the paint surface from any of my retouching so in the future should there be any future conservation needs my retouchings will be able to be removed without having fused to the original paint. Now let's get back to Sem. In late March 1939 Sem and Clara by then both in their 60s were given notice to leave their home because another new law had been passed ruling that non-Jews were not allowed to rent out property to Jews. They would have to leave Germany his son Ernst and wife Ilse hadn't been able to find anything so what chance did they have? But Sem remembered the British internees during World War One and he still had some of their addresses. He wrote to them all and one a Mr J Smith to whom the family owe a great debt of gratitude immediately agreed meaning they could bypass the visa waiting list. They packed up as much stuff as they could but I don't think it amounted to much. There wasn't room for the big portraits of Amelie, Sem's pride and joy and Bridget's guess is that they decided to leave it behind but at the very last minute Sem couldn't bear to and he cut out the face probably just before they left the apartment for the very last time. It looks to have been taken in hand luggage not sent in the crate with the rest of their stuff and as we've seen it's folded in half so I imagine Sem cut the face out folded it in half and tucked it into his jacket when they left the apartment. So this portrait of his mother which meant so much to him because she died young and while he was young was probably one of the last things he grabbed and what's been great to see is these photographs of Sem in his apartment and his workspace. You can see all the different medical equipment that he's got the eye charts on the wall there's a couple of engravings nearby. Now there's a painting above there again not quite sure what that is but Bridget managed to access an archive of photographs of the apartment from a I believe it was a Jewish museum and she asked for some more scans and they unearthed this photograph as well. Now this shows from the other angle and where he stood you've got a picture of a lady there and then there's another picture above. Now I think I can make out a hand holding something but look how ornate that frame is. Now if this was the frame that held Amelie in there's no wonder he couldn't get that out of the apartment in such a hurry. So I'm wondering if this is the portrait or it could well be that there is another portrait somewhere else in the apartment that wasn't captured by these photographs but it's just fabulous that she's got these and we can imagine Sem, we can imagine what's happening in this apartment and this terrible story and how they've had to flee under such extreme circumstances it's it really it for me it really doesn't bear thinking about. So I'm trying to just fill within those cracked and that lost area and then once I've got a nice layer of the filler I'll take my spatula all the way across using both sides of the paint surface to act as like a template or guide if you like and as I take the palette knife across it should just leave the filled area filled and then the excess layer on the outside becomes very thin and I'll be able to remove that later with a small swab but you can see here on the left hand side we've got quite a few losses and I believe this has all happened due to the transportation of this painting due to the fact that it was folded that it was cut off and probably didn't have the the safest journey across to England either and then here this is the bulk of that crease across the face and there are only one two there are only three little losses across the whole of that there's a couple of wrinkles yes but there's nothing loose there's nothing to suggest that anything else will come off further and as previously mentioned that barrier varnish will act as kind of a layer to keep everything down so here just a little bit of distilled water on my swab and I can tidy up those areas and then these sections will be ready for retouching so these are my restoration chips there are pigments and they're held in a binding resin and then this solution is an alcohol-based solution will soften the pigments and allow me to retouch in they dry very very quickly you can't blend them like oil paints so you have to build up layers so my first layer is just a base layer to match the the kind of colour tone that I'm going for they're drying about I'd say 15 to 20 seconds and then you can go over them again so I'm just going to bring in the side of a cheek here and kind of take away the background as well and then once I'm happy with the overall composition I can start working into that and adding the correct colour tones so with the first pass I try and get a basic flesh tone in there and then as that dries I'm using little diagonal strokes to kind of feather in changes and gradients as well so hundreds of little tiny strokes that'll dry and I can go over the top sometimes you can make the pigments a little bit translucent for a kind of wash but invariably you're just building up small layers now on these cracks as I've said I don't want to fill them it's part of the painting's history but what I am trying to do is minimize the effect from viewing distance so I'm just applying pigments in the deepest recesses to push those back and at the same time looking for anywhere else that might need a little bit of attention and then the same with areas like this I look for the tones adjacent to the damage start building up approximate layers and then try and match and introduce shade and texture to match as close as possible now what you're seeing here will be first pass and I will probably attend to these later once they're fully dried and I'll see the whole painting and go back in and rework these as well and this is that nice emerald green background I was talking to you about well maybe it's not emerald green it's kind of a rich warm green and again just attaching joy just tackling any little areas of loss as well as I go along but this view is sort of viewing distance you can read the painting you can see her face whole yes those cracks are there but then once you're drawn into them that's when you'll discover the story about this painting and be able to read in a little bit of its history so unfortunately members of Sam's family didn't survive the holocaust his other son and his son's wife didn't make it through so Klaus stayed with Bridget's side of the family in England and these are the repercussions that felt through families and the portrait stayed in the drawer in the folder I don't know whether it was too painful for Sam to tackle that job or get it framed I don't know maybe there was just too much pain attached to that picture but now Bridget's the custodian of this painting and the story of the family she holds the story now and she wanted to preserve this painting for future generations and to be able to be part of that story is is very humbling really and now we discussed a frame for Amelie and I did have something in the studio that was sort of suitable but needed cutting down but during the process I found this other molding that I feel is a lot more suitable and suits her better so without Bridget knowing I've just gone ahead and ordered this frame I hope she does like it I wanted something that would compliment her and it matches the colors of her dress and because it's dark it allows a bit of space around the portrait because it was so close cropped this darker frame will add a little bit more to the painting rather than close cropping it so that's why I decided to go with this so the last stages of this restoration now are just pulling everything together the painting sits perfectly in that frame I'm just going to mark on to the edge Amelie's name now the original marking is on the canvas underneath the stretcher but I wanted to add something physical to the painting as well so if ever does get separated from its frame again people will know who she is and then on the back I'm adding the photograph of the inscription and then this label has details about the sitter a little bit about the story I'm sure Bridget can add to this in her archive and a little bit about the restoration techniques and materials that I've used to restore this painting so it outlines the various adhesives and the varnishes and the retouching pigments that I've used so in the future should somebody want to do some further restoration work or it requires it they'll know exactly what I have done to the painting so with it all fitted up it's time to put Amelie on the and have a look at her in her new frame I hope you'll agree that this does set her off the tones in the frame match the tones in her dress that little highlight on the inner slip area I'd like to think brings out the lace and the details in her gown we can see now the painting's fully cleaned we've got that horizontal cracking in there that tells the story of what's happened to this painting I feel like she's almost got a smile there on the left hand side of her mouth and I think she looks great in that frame let's remind ourselves how Amelie arrived at the studio here she is a scrap or a fragment of a much larger painting and then here she is after strip lining cleaning restoration keeping the history of those cracks in place to tell that story of how she was cut from an art a larger canvas folded and hurriedly taken to another country and here she is now restored and ready to tell her story to the rest of the world what was great about this whole project was that we had all this information we had a photograph of Amelie um which was nice to see we had the photographs of Sam in his apartment and um it just painted a whole picture and then Bridget had the whole story down and I just loved the way it was passed on to her and she captured so much of it and was able to give me all that information to make this story come alive and it's such a sad story in many respects but I'm so glad that Sam took that painting and cut it out to save it and I really hope that now the story's finished for now that it gets passed on again and Bridget's family are proud to hang Amelie back up on the wall and tell that story to whoever looks at the painting okay guys I hope you enjoyed that video um I've got Amelie over there on the bench and I would say she she's definitely got a smile to her face now um it was such a great story it was such a great painting and I feel really honoured to have been entrusted with that family heirloom and that story and I hope I did it justice um thanks as ever for watching thanks for your support thanks for your likes and comments keep them coming if you've got any questions please fire away um weather in Manchester it's changing it's definitely getting colder so it's mild today grey touch of blue sky there somewhere in the distance but we're definitely coming into autumn now which I don't mind I quite like the cool weather and I'm looking forward to the trees changing colour and stuff especially after that heat wave this summer so I hope you're all well wherever you are and um yeah it's good to be back and I will see you on the next one I've got a great painting on the bench ready to share with you so thanks as ever for your support have a great weekend and I'll see you on the next one okay guys take care bye